beginner, appreciate for any advice!
It can be hard to learn at first but you need to take long and sometimes frustrating baby steps. If possible, try to understand both 2.79b while it is still available for download and also 2.8. 2.8 is still in beta and brand new, as of about a month or 2 ago.

Most tutorials are for Blender 2.7x so I would advise to start off there and use tutorials such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kes2qmijy7w Blender fundamentals. Blender Guru is also a good source for medium to higher level modelling and has just released a video on the new 2.8 layout which I suggest watching Watch both this one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVpg4_POww, which is the Blender Guru new layout video, and the first link which is a Blender 2.79b video of a similar nature to gather how different the versions are, which is why I suggested to learn 2.79b since there are so many videos available for it. Start small and learn all the functions first. Remember that Blender engine has been removed in favour of the new Eevee rendering engine so as much as possible try to learn in cycles, but couldn't hurt to learn both the blender engine and eevee engine layouts.

Since 2.8 is still new there won't be as many answers and the layout has dramatically changed so it would be hard for a beginner to watch tutorials done in a 2.7x version and follow along in 2.8, which is why I suggest learning 2.79b first. Once you have an understanding of 2.79b then you can transfer allot of skills easily over to 2.8 by finding the new locations of the tools and menus. Good luck with it.